


Father of the Smiling God/Father of the Screaming God

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Fridge of Sorrow, I also mention the, Insane Clown Posse References, Miracles, Other, So..., The Angel of Double Death - Freeform, but there are mentions of violence in various Gamzee-ish ways, clown mythology, comic analysis, gods from an egg, headcanons, raising scary skull babies, so many blood-soaked miracles, the hall of illusions, the paradise planet, there aren't really GRAPHIC depictions of violence I don't think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 23:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Listen, children of paradise and rage.  Turn your faces, sticky with splattered paint and blood and stardust, up to our sky.  Look to where it’s emptiest  –<br/>It could have been there that it happened.<br/>Listen, because no one else listened and then it was too late:<br/>For there came a time in the shambling, knock-kneed stretches of history that the Mirthful Messiahs were born of chains and candy that could steal your senses, born on a grey world beneath a seething sky… Like our sky.</p>
<p>The jester dragged both Muse and Lord out of impossibility, and they said he was a fool.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Father of the Smiling God/Father of the Screaming God

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading. :) <3 more musing about Gamzee and his gods~~~ 
> 
> PS -- in researching the Insane Clown Posse for Gamzee-related purposes, I discovered a song called "Hall of Illusions," about people being shown visions to punish them for their crimes during life and then being brutally murdered by clowns. I feel like, what with Gamzee being a judge-figure in that trial he arranged for Vriska, this might be an element within his messiahs' church... and with the "great Milenko" waving a wand to kick off all this clown-judge action... and Calliope having a wand... I don't know. Calliope runs the Hall of Illusions now, I suppose. just a theory, or a possibility. again, headcanons galore.

_Listen, children of paradise and rage.  Turn your faces, sticky with splattered paint and blood and stardust, up to our sky.  Look to where it’s emptiest  –_

_It could have been there that it happened._

_Listen, because no one else listened and then it was too late:_

_For there came a time in the shambling, knock-kneed stretches of history that the Mirthful Messiahs were born of chains and candy that could steal your senses, born on a grey world beneath a seething sky… Like our sky._

_See why you’re looking up, up, up?_

_Imagine their sky, now, and imagine the gods still small, still simple bleeding things._

_Imagine the Bard with them.  He had gaudy scars and grape-soda blood, then.  He built his gods from a dizzy egg._

_The Bard bowed his head, pious before paradox space, before battles that no one else could imagine, yet – before a glitching, scratched-disc reality inside a reality inside a ruined and dying frog._

_The gods were the children of a clown, first, before the world knew double-death.  See now how the faithful wove his faith from nothing?   He believed so ferociously, so violently, in these twofold laughing messiahs that when a puppet said to make them real it must have been a mercy as well as a damnation._

_The jester dragged both Muse and Lord out of impossibility, and they said he was a fool._

…

Father of the Smiling God

…

It was said, in the most sacred hymn-raps of Alternia’s gore-soaked Mirthful Church, that the messiahs would bring their faithful to a paradise planet, a small, muffled eternity of revels before the end of the world.  Gamzee thought of these endless fountains of fizzing, stinging elixir, enough to drown a cosmos even while sugar-rotting it from within and turning its eyes to crystalline gum.  He thought of the fountains and the brilliant, rambling tents he’d been promised, and he shivered.   How long had Gamzee waited to end with euphoric, liberating stupor, among friends and the faithful, one of many, one of the dreaming?  How many of his dreams had been all about belonging, in the end, belonging and finally forgetting to hurt? 

Gamzee thought of a world _actually bleeding as equals_ , as he had sung about with Tavros in a simpler life.  He thought of that world being raw and real as his own still-aching scars, and he held a small, helpless skull girl cradled in the crook of his arm.  He spoke to her, told her things she would forget or remember, it was impossible to know.  He fed her slivers of dripping meat. 

“Calliope,” he whispered, where no one else could hear him, and the little girl squealed in a voice that couldn’t have been human, couldn’t have been troll.  She toyed with his curls, and batted sharp baby-claws against his painted cheeks. 

Gamzee served as Lil Cal’s hands, of course, even tending to the children and raising them into gods.   Here, though, his mind was clearest.  He knew this girl, and it was his _choice_ to smile at her, gentle, _gentle_ and proud.  She _was_ the Smiling Messiah, the Angel of Impossible Life, the Angel of Unspoken Possibilities – the Angel of Miracles.  She was, or else none of this meant anything. 

None of this meant anything but more blasphemous lies, heaped sour and coolkid-slick on the stew of all Gamzee had believed for so long and let fall out through him, fall through the staring holes sopor slime had left in his brain.

There were stories about this child in his sacred doctrines, Gamzee told himself.  She was the one who walked among mortals, wearing skins like theirs for reasons only she could know, befriending them and taking them along to paradise.  She was the one whose magician-clowns performed the cleverest tricks – hers was the Hall of Illusions, punishing the faithless and the cruel.  Her humor was wicked slick and merciless.   She would coat her words in her brother’s blood, just like he would soak his own words in hers. 

What sort of messiahs wouldn’t know how to have a good laugh?

This girl’s – this _angel’s –_ illusion-mirrors would show warped almost-histories to the damned and the heartless.  It was in the Smiling Angel’s tents that the wicked Subjugglators would be punished along with the lowblood masses, after all.  Gamzee had pinned up paintings of her wandering, haunted halls on his hive walls, imagining the righteous terror chilling the place all through, the justified screams that would make the mirrors dance and clatter and all the illusions shake.

That myth – no, true-fact history of the future, wasn’t it? – had been the origin of clowns as justice-bringers, clowns as holy judges.  That was the start of the Mirthful Church’s rampage on sacred, fallen Alternia.

And hadn’t Gamzee pounded the Warhammer of Zillyhoo loud and furious, back at the trial he set up for Vriska, rattling his predecessors’ bones way back in time?  Hadn’t he played his part well?

Not well enough.  Never well enough.

Still, his newly-born, forever-real Angel of Miracles would stand with a wand in her clawed hand, and her judgement would come with a grin.

So it had been written and sung for thousands upon thousands of sweeps.

So Gamzee had willed into reality; so the leering, impossibly cold puppet had dreamed behind glassy plastic eyes.

Calliope smiled now, cheek pressed into Gamzee’s shoulder.  She held on to him, and Gamzee would remember _that_ even when he couldn’t remember much else to warm his frozen, hate-seeped bones.   She would squeeze her eyes shut, as if he could protect her.  She would choose to hold on to Gamzee – and when had anyone else done something like that unprompted, before?  And this wasn’t just anyone, but an Angel blazing unthinkable.  Not a lusus, not a matesprit, not a goddamn motherfucking _friend_ , not a –

It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter –

It couldn’t matter.

The Angel of Impossible Lives smiled in Gamzee’s arms

and half the time, gamzee would speak with her borrowed voice.

…

Father of the Screaming God

…

Whatever tents would sprawl in bleeding, soaring paradise – whatever fountains would burn your skin and numb your mind, whatever miraculous stunts would be performed in ritual on the Grief Trapeze, eventually _all would end_.  It would end in a shattering, inevitable honk, a honk that would shake apart the world and leave it double-dead.  That’s how it had been sung since the Mirthful Church began, began before empresses, before Sufferers and revolutions – that’s how it had been sung since laughter first welled up on grim old Alternia like blood from a fatal wound. 

Perhaps, if Gamzee had been a different troll, it might have been a relief to think of the honk never coming, the honk reduced to a legend, suddenly frail and silly as everyone else had always said.

True, Gamzee had always preferred the paradise planet’s stories, all those shining promises, all that joy and family.  Who wouldn’t, stuck on a beach where seadwellers could rise from briny, grimdark depths at any moment to strike him dead? 

There a young, forgiving and forgotten Gamzee sat, for hours, on and off for all his wasted sweeps.

  There he watched for his lusus’s back to crest the water – and how many times had Gamzee mistaken the swell of waves for his only family coming home?  How many times had he nearly fallen asleep on the beach, sand sprinkling his hair and ground into his eyes, sopor dribbling down his lip and the sky easing far enough into morning that it burned him?

It shouldn’t have mattered anymore, but part of Gamzee was always waiting on a beach of some sort, waiting on a beach or wading into waters he could never swim, knowing he had been hatched _just too warm_ to grow gills.  He was so close, always so close, but still waiting.  Waiting for his lusus, for almost-lovers, for friends and now – the last straw, the breaking point, the punchline – for his own gods.

No more.  Never again would Gamzee be forgiving and forgotten. 

That’s what Gamzee thought about when he tended to the Screaming God, the Angel of Ruinous Ages, the Angel of Endings, the Angel of Double-Death.  He thought about how he wouldn’t wait on the beach for his gods to reveal themselves like his lusus almost never did.  He would let the gods cackle and storm and rage, growing into themselves, filling the role-vials they were poured into. 

When Caliborn bit Gamzee’s shoulder, he sunk his teeth in deeper and deeper _knowingly_ when Gamzee began to scream.  That was like the legends, too.  That was like the wicked spikes on clubs the Grand Highblood carried, spikes that were supposed to be holy teeth.   Teeth of a god, teeth that were said to taste the unworthy blood their master fed them.  They were always hungry, and so was Caliborn – you can’t bring laughing Double-Death without a taste for blood.

And so Gamzee howled, and then he laughed, and the Screaming God laughed too.  It was a sound like something shattering, and Gamzee told himself this was right.

This was as things were meant to be, according to wicked prophesies and miraculous knowings going back further than he could ever understand.  Sure, absolutely. 

Gamzee prayed before blood-painted walls just like his ancestors did, lathering his face in ground-up stardust so he could barely see.  He told himself that this reason for being was a noble one, a better one than a little boy thrashing in the sand, drowning in half-felt nightmares could have hoped for.      

He told himself to be proud, to be a priest, to be a bard.

Even if it hurt

Maybe _especially_ if it hurt

Gamzee would let the honk come, he told himself, even if it made him awful clown trash, even if it meant he’d never get to see the paradise planet.  Maybe the nearly-forever party was happening somewhere without him, stretching its mania as wildly as it could go, its raging music swallowed up by space.  That would be better than it never happening at all, somehow, even it was still a slice of Gamzee’s heart missing, even if it was another sweep spent on the beach staring out at nodding, heartless waves.

Gamzee would let the honk come, because that meant it was supposed to – if this whole gods-from- skulls plan was just another blasphemy, then the Vast Honk just _wouldn’t come true_. 

But it _would_ come true, Gamzee knew, because the gods were as real as he could craft them.

As real as his shredded shoulder, as real as his painted, drooping wings.

As real as the Angel of Double Death, rattling his chains and watching Gamzee with eyes that could boil even his chilly clown blood.

AND HALF THE TIME, GAMZEE WOULD SPEAK WITH HIS BORROWED VOICE.


End file.
